stronglist.com

What is Campfire?
Campfire is real time chat done right. It allows a group of people to easily communicate with each other in real time.
Once you sign up you can create a room and invite others to participate. You can also enable guest access so anyone who has the URL to your room can participate in the conversation. Having a permanent link to a real time chatroom gives the admin alot of flexibility. You can use campfire for alot of uses.

So how is campfire better than an Instant Messager?
IM is too intruisive, I find it difficult to work when my IM is running. Now that I have campfire I use IM for friends/personal and I mainly use campfire for business/serious communication.
Campfire is also alot more more reliable than IM. A bunch of us did a hockey pool over IM this year, and once in a while a user would get dropped. It was a real hassle getting that person back into the conversation. We switched to campfire and the conversation was flawless.

I guess the look and feel also helps with the overall user experience?
Definitely. Its a typical 37signals application. The design is fresh and clean. Im tempted to say that the user interface is intuitive (it is), but quite honestly chatting requires very minimal interface requirements, so in this case “intuitive interface” was very easy to satisfy.

Does Campfire archive your conversations?
Yes, you can access the archives by clicking the “Files and transcripts” tab. You can then search your conversations, or filter your conversation based on the Room, Person, or Day. You can also easily access any uploaded files from this page.

Ok archiving sounds good, but how about privacy issues, what if I want to keep some conversations private?
Easy. Admin’s have the option to “lock” the room. Once you lock the room, nobody else can enter the room and the conversation is held “off the record”, the conversation will not be archived if the room is locked.

What is Strongspace?
Its an online storage service.

Why do you use Strongspace over all the other storage services out there?
Its the trust factor. I know Strongspace is backed by Joyent, the company that merged with textdrive. I trust Joyent, and have confidence that my files will be around.

Can you use it to share your files
Yes but Strongspace should be viewed more as a secure storage service than a sharing service. Stongspace is closed to the outside world. Files are not publicly available. Users need to login to access files.
I have used Strongspace to share files. I dont like emailing large files. So when Im working closely with someone where I know Ill have to send alot of files, I’ll upload my files to Strongspace and send the login to the recipient. I dont have to worry about that user accessing my personal files as you can limit users to a directory.

How easy is it to upload files to Strongspace.
Very easy. Using the web form you can upload individual files or upload a zip and then unzip it on the server. For multiple files you’ll want to transfer via a SFTP application, such as Filezilla (windows) or Cyberduck (Mac).
Windows user should look into SftpDrive. It will allow you to map a SSH server on a Windows network drive. SftpDrive will save you time. To date Sftp cost $39 but its well worth the cost. SftpDrive also comes with a 3GB lifetime Strongspace account. Thats a great deal.

Any other comments
Strongspace is one of the apps that doesnt do much but does an awesome job with what it does. The interface is nice and clean, with no BS. After using Strongspace for a bit you’ll gain confidence in it, you’ll know your files/backups have found their online home.

Whoa hold on a bit, thats alot of praise
Yeah, I suppose so, but this app does its job. Its worthy of the praise.

What is Joyent?
Its an online application suite that offers email, calendars, contacts, and bookmarking.

What do you use it for?
I use it to check my various email accounts. Its a real time saver. I have many email accounts, some for business and some for personal. Instead of logging in and checking all these accounts, I forward them all to my joyent account. Joyent allows you to setup smartboxes, so you can filter all of your incoming emails.

Checking all you email in one spot seems like a wicked time saver, Are there any negatives with this step?
Yeah, currently almost all of the email that I send vis Joyent ends up in the users Junk mail folder. So its not that efficient. I use Joyent to view my email but to respond back I have to login to my original email account. eg. Gmail.
Update: This no longer seems to be an issue.

Ok, how else do you use Joyent?
Joyent recently released a book marking tool. Its very sharp. The tool has standard features such as a bookmarklet and tags, but it also stores a screenshot of the page you bookmarked. Once you use a bookmarking tool that takes auto screenshots you cant go back to one that doesnt, for that reason alone I prefer Joyents bookmarking to that of delicious.

Joyent also has file storage, a calendar and an address book.

Is Joyent a team based office suite or is it more for personal use?
I use it for personal use, but it also really shines in a team environment. You can add tags to files and emails, share calendars and set notifications to keep your team connected.

Tell me more about staying connected via Joyent
Sure, you can stay connected via smart groups. Smart groups “bring in” your data. So you can create a group that displays all of your items (files, bookmarks, emails) that are tagged “work” or “design”, you can even display the files of your teammates. Joyent really helps your team stay in sync.
I found the documentation about smart groups and workspaces a bit lacking, it’ll take you a bit of fiddling to get into the groove, but once you have it figured out the smart groups will become a great time saver.

Whats the pricing
To date the pricing starts at $15 a month. This price also includes textdive hosting and a strongspace account. Pricing here.

Any other comments
Yeah Joyent is a beautifully designed application, the UI feels like a desktop application. I look forward to using it daily. Joyent comes highly recommended for team or personal use.